My editor and I remain very disciplined. It's just sometimes when you're making a film, you get into the cutting room and you see a scene that's slowing you down in a certain section, but if you remove that scene then, emotionally or story-wise, another scene a half-hour later won't have the same impact. You just get stuck with it.
Alexander PayneIf you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.
Alexander PayneI think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.
Alexander PayneI'd love to be a director-for-hire and get a nice paycheck and captain one of those big ships, but I think studios mistakenly think I want to write what I direct - which I don't. I write out of desperation, because I never get a script I like, other than "Nebraska." It's a matter of: What's the screenplay? Is it intelligent? Is it human? I don't care what genre, what scale. I'm here for the movies.
Alexander Payne